THE GIANT JOSHUAMaurine Whip-pieHoughton, Mifflin ($2.75).
A first book, The Giant Joshua is the 633-page story of a Mormon wife and of the pioneer community in which she lived out her marriage. Exhaustively detailed and rather well-told, it is not merely a good fictional history of a special group and period; it is also a good novel about human beings in general.
The wife's name was Clorinda MacIntyre. The community was Dixie Mission, which she helped build out of the harsh, savagely colored wilderness 300 miles south of the Great Salt Lake Valley.
When she was 17, Clorinda had just become one of the...